Cheap shots: How to shoot pro-quality video on a budget

Whether you're an aspiring filmmaker or you just want to shoot better home …

So you’ve shot a few home movies, and maybe even some scripted ones, on your HD handy-cam. But when you play the footage back on your computer or television it sounds and looks bad. Even if it turns out all right, there is still something that makes it look cheap and amateurish.

The biggest telltale sign of amateur work is audio quality. Even if the footage looks relatively sharp and clear with good color depth, bad audio will cheapen the whole experience. Crystal clear audio screams “professional.”

The second telltale sign of amateur work is image quality. This tends to be a symptom of the videographer not understanding lighting science. The subject may be too dark against a bright background, or the footage has an unwanted color tint. A well-trained videographer can shoot amazing footage on the cheapest of handy-cams; making it look like it was shot on a professional camera.

If you just want to shoot home videos of family and friends, then I recommend you stick to what you are already doing, but if you want to shoot videos that look and sound professional, be ready to invest around $500 on some extra equipment.

About HD handy-cams

First, you need to understand why HD handy-cam footage tends to look cheap when compared to professional footage.

Sensor Size

The electronic sensor that collects the light information passing through the lens tends to be very small on consumer handy-cams. Therefore, such cameras require much more light than professional cameras to capture good footage. Consumer cameras compensate for this small sensor size by boosting the sensitivity of the sensor; but this results in very grainy footage. To avoid capturing grainy footage, the auto-exposure function should be disabled and set manually.

To properly set exposure manually use the camera’s histogram function. Nearly all consumer handy-cams have this functionality, and when you activate it, a small graph will appear somewhere on the screen. The graph represents the levels of tonality in the footage. Absolute black is on the left and absolute white is on the right.

In theory, ideal footage has neither black nor white present, and the graph would be a perfect bell-curve indicating well-balanced contrast. In practice, you increase the exposure until the histogram almost reaches the right side of the graph. This prevents over-exposing the footage while maintaining rich shadows that are naturally occurring.

When setting the exposure, you do not want to go past 75 percent of the maximum; doing so will result in grainy footage. If the exposure is at 75 percent of the maximum and the histogram is nowhere near the right side of the graph, and/or the footage is definitely too dark, then you need more light.

Another symptom of a small sensor is a very deep depth-of-focus. This means that everything looks like it is in focus, or very close to being in focus. Professional cameras with larger sensors have the ability to focus solely on a subject, using a shallow depth-of-focus, that gives the foreground and background that beautiful blurry effect seen in Hollywood movies.

A shallow depth-of-focus can be faked on a handy-cam by using the tele-macro function. This must be done while using a tripod to avoid the footage turning out very shaky.

Focus and white balance

Handy-cams make life easier by automating most of the video settings required to capture footage, but a good videographer will always set things manually. Focus and white balance are two settings that can easily ruin the look of a video.

Auto-focus is very useful, but you must be aware of its limitations. It is generally very slow to respond to sudden changes in the scene. So, for example, if the subject suddenly gets very close to the camera, and just as quickly pulls back, the auto-focus will get confused and the whole scene will go blurry for a few seconds.

If you are shooting a very dynamic scene auto-focus is a must, but you must try to keep the changes in distance to the subject very gradual. By making the approach or withdrawal to the subject very slow, the auto-focus is able to cope and maintain sharp focus.

If, on the other hand, you are shooting a static scene, like an interview, then a fixed focus is a better option. Once you have set up the camera on the tripod and the subject has taken position, activate the handy-cam’s one-touch focus function. This will deactivate auto-focus and keep the current focus setting.

Auto-white balance is the devil—seriously, never use it. The problem here relates to lighting science, which will be covered in detail in the next section. Always set white balance manually by using the camera’s one-touch white balance function. All you have to do is hold a white piece of paper, or cardboard, in front of the camera and activate the one-touch white balance function. Auto-white balance will be deactivated and you may notice that the image suddenly looks more faithful to the actual scene you are shooting.

Be aware that you need to white balance again if you change location—if, for example, you are indoors and you go outdoors. While this is a good rule to follow, there are more things to consider which will be covered in the next section on lighting science.

Image processing and compression

Depending on what type of handy-cam you have, there is a plethora of possibilities for how it could be processing the footage and finally recording it to tape, hard-disk drive (HDD), or flash media.

Handy-cams tend to have a shake reduction function that reduces the amount of shake when shooting by hand. This function makes the image look more stable at the expense of reducing the quality. It is far better practice to disable this function and use a tripod or a shoulder mounted steady-cam. Both of these items can be bought for under $50 each if you search online.

Regardless of whether a camera records to tape, HDD, or flash media, there is a level of video compression applied to the footage. The compression is primarily applied to the color range and the image resolution. Most HDD and flash media cameras have a setting for how many hours of footage can be recorded; set this to the least number of hours possible, which will set the footage to the highest quality setting. Apart from this, there is nothing you can do about compression until you edit the footage, at which point you can convert it to a less compressed format and digitally enhance the color and quality.

Lighting science

When we look at the world around us through our own eyes, there's a complicated process that delivers what we see to our consciousness. The pupil in our eye expands or contracts to let in the amount of light required for us to see clearly. Even in very low lighting the human eye is capable of adjusting so we can see the environment around us. Our brain dynamically interprets the light, normalizes the information, and provides a faithful representation of the colors in the environment.

The temperature of light

What we see as white light is, at least in theory, a balanced mix of all the colors in the spectrum. In reality, the balance is never even, and one color is more dominant than the rest. In lighting science, a light source has a temperature attributed to it, measured in Kelvins (K), which indicates the dominant color in that light source. Cool light is dominated by the red end of the spectrum, and hot light is dominated by the blue end of the spectrum. For example, a standard light globe is rated at 3200K, which is quite cool, and therefore red/orange is the dominant color.

If you have your handy-cam set to auto-white balance and there are light sources of varying temperature, then the camera will continuously be trying to adjust, and you will end up with a horrible shifting color tint in your footage. You must set your white balance manually, as mentioned previously, using the one-touch white balance. You must also make sure all your light sources are of the same temperature. Remember that the temperature rating does not relate to the heat of a light source, but rather its dominant color. Here is a list of the most common light sources and their temperature ratings:

Tungsten: 3200K (red/orange tint) - a
standard light globe

White fluorescent: 4000K (green tint) -
standard office lighting

Daylight: 5200K (light blue tint) -
this is direct sunlight

Cloudy: 6000K (blue tint) - an overcast
sky including the shade

Shade: 7000K (deep blue/indigo tint) -
on a bright sunny day

Note that on a cloudy day, the temperature of light in the shade is the same as not being in the shade. This is because the clouds diffuse the direct sunlight as well, creating a uniform light temperature in the environment. On a sunny day in the shade, you get the light diffused by the atmosphere, but in direct sunlight you get the sun’s un-diffused light; two separate temperature ratings. So if you shoot footage on a cloudy (overcast) day, and the camera has been properly white balanced, you can shoot anywhere and get accurate color reproduction.

48 Reader Comments

Interesting article. Some of the initial setup seems a little weird to me, but maybe that's because I am a still photographer first as far as hobbies go, and video is waaay down the list. The lighting info was very interesting, though!

This is somewhat outside the scope of the article, but you'll notice if you read and understand what the author is saying that much of your work here is fighting against the automatic functions on a cheap consumer camera - autofocus, auto white balance, auto audio gain controls, auto exposure, etc.

While a consumer camera is OK for basic experimentation, all that battling with auto-everything may be a waste of time. There are a slew of great SD "prosumer" cameras (IMHO, Panasonic is one of the better brands - good glass, good quality and you're not paying for the nameplate like that company that starts with an "S") on the used market. Yes, they aren't "HD", but they are high quality 3 chip cameras with large image sensors. I don't even want to look at EBay to see what the DVX-100A sitting next to me is going for, but I'll wager it's down at least 1/2 of the original cost if not more. These cameras generally make it easy to switch between auto and manual modes (although I must say I let mine do the WB itself since it tends to be correct 99.999% of the time). You also don't need to buy a separate audio recorder - the prosumer cameras give you two tracks of audio, phantom power for your mics, and balanced XLR inputs - and the amazing bonus of not needing to sync your audio in post.

For microphones, a good workhorse is the Audio Technica AT-897.

For a good "rabbit" (the wind shield is referred to by a different dead animal on this side of the pond), I have no good suggestions. Rycote is the big name, and they have a big price for a big ball of fur. I tried a few knock offs, and they work OK, but don't try to use them in winds over 15-20 MPH, even with a low-cut filter. Come to think of it, the used market for all sorts of audio stuff is also pretty good, and the price difference between new and used is decent enough. A good model of mic tends to not change too much over the decades. The exception would be the wireless kits, but that's an article unto itself.

Anyhow, that's my $0.02 - look at the used market for less hassle, a better learning experience, and far more flexibility.

edit: Forgot to note, some prosumer cams also have a image stabilization function that does NOT degrade image quality. There are essentially two ways to do image stabilization in the camera. They both rely on an accelerometer to detect the shake, but they differ in how they correct it. The way the author describes loses quality because the camera is essentially doing a zoom (in the digital domain) to give it some room around the newly-reframed image - shake a bit left or right, and it does a compensating digital pan of the image to counteract that. The zoom and in some cases crappy processing in the camera are what degrade the resolution. The other way is an optical stabilization method. Same sensors, same idea, but instead of doing this digitally, small actuators move an element in the lens to compensate for the movement - no zooming/panning in the digital realm, so no real degradation of the image. The digital method can also be done in post, FWIW. Always remember to turn off either when you're using a tripod, or you'll find it "correcting" your smooth pans...

I think there is a glitch that should be corrected:"Gold reflectors are gold in color, and the light that bounces off their surface is shifted towards a cooler (orange/yellow) temperature."This should read "warmer" not "cooler".

I do not understand the reasoning behind the "bigger sensors allow narrower focus". I see the result, that "everything somehow in focus" looks amateurish. But the explanation does not make sense to me. If anything, then a smaller sensor requires the camera to "open up" to let more light in, which in turn means that the lens focus becomes more important. Only large sensors that are very sensitive to light allow to reduce the aperture to a small hole and still get good results. So while I agree on the effect of using focus as a tool for pro-looking recordings, the explanation provided in the article is not helpful for me.

*clap clap*! Great article.@Ars Staff: why have these kinds of in-depth technical 'how to' articles been so infrequent in recent years? Reminds me of the old days Ars when used to be my go to site for fabulous technical reference. Still love you guys, but please bring us more of this.

"A good production requires four distinct audio elements: voice, ambience, foley, and music. The first three tracks are all recorded at the time of filming, except on big-budget films where every audio element is recreated in post-production."

this is not *exactly* true. even big-budget films record audio on location, and frequently use it. it is true that nearly all the time, at least some dialogue is re-recorded in post, but it's an exaggeration to say that every audio element is recreated in post.

also, one usually uses the term "foley" to refer only to sound effects which are created in post-production by a foley artist, such as the movement of clothing, footsteps, etc. to say that foley is recorded at the time of filming (on non-big-budget films) isn't exactly right; the on-set sounds which are recorded aren't foley. the post-production process of re-creating those sounds is foley.

I agree with the comment about turning off digital shake reduction as it will decrease picture quality.

However if your Handycam is equipped with *optical* image stabilisation (or stabilization if you're in the US) then you should be able to leave it on without image quality impact, and it will improve any hand held footage a lot (but not as much as a steadycam attachment).

Entry level models use the digital stabilisation which can be useful for your uncle when he's videoing your sisters wedding after a few whiskeys (any degradation produced by the image processing probably won't be the worst thing in the footage)

Mid to Higher end single CCD Handycams (before you get to the pro level equipment) frequently offer OIS (Optical image stabilisation) similar to what you get with IS (image stabilised) lenses for your DSLR, where optical elements (lenses) are moved fractionally to compensate for camera movement. They do produce a dramatic improvement (compensating for 3-4 whiskeys on the uncle scale), they can only do so much though.

From the article:Apart from this, there is nothing you can do about compression until you edit the footage, at which point you can convert it to a less compressed format and digitally enhance the color and quality.

Uhh, you can convert it to a higher bit-rate and maybe do some fancy upscaling/noise reduction/cleanup/whatever, but you ain't getting any more information than was originally written to tape/disk/flash.

I'm a professional television editor and sometimes have to work with a mix of material. Sometimes the main camera is a $50,000+ pro model but B-Roll is shot on a $500 consumer cam. I can do a lot to match color and tonality to make the two look more alike, and if the consumer cam is set as suggested the grain isn't always a big issue. But there's one thing that no one can do much about: Sharpness. You see, an INEXPENSIVE pro lens is around $5,000. A really good pro lens can run several times that. Granted, some of that cost goes into making a pro lens rugged enough to take some of the abuse likely encountered from daily use in a variety of situations, but the big difference is carefully constructed GLASS optics. If it were possible, you'd get better video from a pro lens fitted on a consumer camera than you would with a consumer lens fitted on a pro camera. You're just never going to get the same sharpness from a consumer camera as you do with a pro camera where the lens alone costs ten times what the entire consumer camera costs.

But here's a more important consideration for most consumers. If you're a budding Steven Spielberg and you don't mind lugging around a hundred pounds of camera gear and lights more power to you. But most people want a video camera small enough to fit in a purse or at least small enough that it doesn't require an "Is it worth it?" decision about whether or not to bring it along. I've got some great, imperfect videos of my kids growing up that I'd never have gotten if I had to go to all the trouble that my pro counterparts suffer through in their daily work. Most people don't realize it, but being a pro videographer requires a LOT of physical labor (unless you've reached the level where you can afford to hire help). I'd rather have the hundred+ hours of imperfect video of my kids growing up than only two hours of absolutely pristine video from only a couple of moments in their lives.

Be honest with yourself about what you plan to do with your video. Most of us won't be making the next "Gone With the Wind." If you saddle yourself with a larger pro-sumer camera you may find yourself tempted to leave it behind often and miss some of life's unpredictable gems.

Though I remember watching a short documentary about Spike Jonez. He said he started out with essentially zero budget by borrowing equipment from major productions while the producers had kit on hire but weren't using it, and apparently that's how Sabotage was filmed.

On lighting: no love for Barry Lyndon? Just get yourself a lens from NASA for when you have to do night-time filming indoors by candlelight

I have a Canon T2i and was wondering if this is ok to shoot some video? and if so any pointers?

Absolutely. While this article is very interesting, the landscape for this level of amateur video has changed in the past year or so with sub $1000 video DSLRs. The quality of video you can get with an $800-900 camera (such as the T2i) is vastly superior to what you can do on a cheap HD camcorder. There are some setbacks, such as the rolling shutter, pretty limited auto-focus, and some awkward ergonomics, but if you're going to the lengths mentioned in this article on a similar budget, the hoops you have to jump through for a DSLR are a lot easier. Some may disagree with that, but I don't think anyone would disagree that DSLR video done well is much better looking than cheap camcorder video done well.

As for pointers, check out the dvxuser forum - there's a section on the Canon DSLRs.

Great article! I'm a film student, and I have a couple of quick thoughts to add:

1) Gold and silver reflectors certainly can work, but it's so easy to have them shift position slightly during a shot (because the person holding them isn't perfectly still, or the wind blows them even if they're on a stand). Once they shift, even a tiny bit, the actor will have glints and sparkles appear on their face. White foam core reflectors are a lot more forgiving, and there are white foam core reflectors with one silver side--those are terrific. The flexible, collapsible reflectors are really meant for photographers, because their tendency to wobble doesn't affect a still image, and the rigid reflectors are easier to use for video (if much more annoying to put in your car!).

2) In direct sunlight, don't overlook the possibility of holding a sheet over the actors to diffuse the light. It can be very beautiful. Whole big-budget shoots have been done under silk canopies (The DP for Vicky Cristina Barcelona used that technique frequently.)

3) One of the biggest lessons to learn, I think, is camera movement. All of the other tricks in the article can be used to perfection, but if you're constantly moving the camera around, zooming in/out, panning for no good reason, you're never going to achieve a professional look. Even hyper-kinetic action movies have less handheld "shaky cam" than you might think.

4) Paper lanterns can make very good nearly-free lighting. Obviously, you have to be careful with color temperatures, because a standard bulb will be 3200K--but you can wrap a gel around the bulb if you need to, and the paper makes a cheap, small softbox. Strings of "Chinese balls," the round paper lanterns, are sometimes used.

One more comment: in the U.S., community access TV stations often have all sorts of gear that you can use for free if you take some classes there. So you may have more professional gear freely available to you than you thought!

"Gold reflectors are gold in color, and the light that bounces off their surface is shifted towards a cooler (orange/yellow) temperature."This should read "warmer" not "cooler".

I caught that too. Cooler = blue light. Warmer = Red.

The cooler/warmer is a reference to the temperature value of the white balance. I think it's related to the black body radiation spectrum: for example, a burning coal has a red/orange color, and if you start blowing air to increase the combustion and, consequently, the temperature, it'll acquire a brighter yellow/white color.

The color being emitted (the wavelength) is directly proportional to the temperature (the value in kelvins). You are probably thinking of the "mood" of the colors, where blue/green give a colder mood, while red/orange a warmer mood, which is the opposite of the temperature rating of the white balance.

That is, if I'm right about the origin of the white balance rating (black body radiation).

It's true that blue is cooler than red in terms of actual temperature. But filmmakers always invert those terms to describe the "feel" of the light. Higher temperature light (bluer) is "cool" and lower-temperature light (redder) is "warm."

Thanks for this Ars. In-depth, well written, and *enabling* -- I mean, all the articles on Aperture or Final Cut Pro in the world won't mean a bloody thing unless a significant portion of your audience *cares*. To the extent that you can help create basic skills that lead people to be interested in or need some of the other software or hardware... That's... Well, you help create and extend your audience.

Anyway, again, thank you for this. I have a cheap HD cam, and a lot of spare time right about now. I'm inspired at this point to drag out the cam and start experimenting.

I realize that he's talking about the actual color temperature. But as a director, if you tell a DP or a colorist that you want something warmer, they're going to bring up the red values in the image, not the blue.

1. The sensor size AND the aperture of the lens are what contribute to the depth of field issues with consumer cameras (both video and still). Not just the sensor size alone. Interestingly enough, the very narrow apertures on these cameras is also directly responsible for the vast amounts of light needed to properly expose.

2. An overcast day is NOT equivalent to "magic hour" shooting. This time actually refers to the exquisitely warm (feel) and softer quality of light. Basically, it makes anyone and anything look about as beautiful as possible.

3. The use of a white sheet of paper is decidedly not a good way of white balancing your camera. Since most white paper is not chemically neutral, you can get uneven results. For best results a neutral 18% gray card should be used.

I'm a regular no-budget filmmaker myself, and I found the article to be informative.

Being no-budget, though, means that I don't have the money for reflectors or lights. And yeah, I do go fully-auto at times because I'm on the run and doing manual is a bad idea for me. I do tend to "splurge" on sound equipment rentals. Getting sorta-bad footage can be fixed. Getting bad sound just makes the whole thing unworkable.

One problem that may come up is that a lot of the consumer HD cameras use the AVCHD codec. While some computers/programs can read the files, they still need to be rendered. I'm not sure about what the details on Windows is, but for Final Cut Express/Pro or iMovie, they need to be transcoded into something like ProRes or AIC in order to be edited. This takes a long long time if you don't have a quad/octo-core computer. In fact, on my 2.2 GHz Core2Duo computer, transferring from tape takes less time (straight capture, not batch).

Editing is a whole other ballgame, though. I honestly still prefer tape at this point. It's more efficient for me, and I've found some ways to use the transfer time better. Transcripts, edit-scripts, etc. can all be done in the 60 minutes (or whatever) that it takes to transfer.

TI do not understand the reasoning behind the "bigger sensors allow narrower focus". I see the result, that "everything somehow in focus" looks amateurish. But the explanation does not make sense to me. If anything, then a smaller sensor requires the camera to "open up" to let more light in, which in turn means that the lens focus becomes more important. Only large sensors that are very sensitive to light allow to reduce the aperture to a small hole and still get good results.

A large sensor does not necessarily imply that it is more sensitive to light. That's the first trick to untangling this.

The rest is all about optics. I'm not going to pretend to fully understand this, but the lens design to make a lens focus the image on a small sensor vs. the design to focus it on a large sensor creates a fairly radically difference in the depth of field *regardless* of whether both lenses are set at say f2.8. The effect is also seen when comparing a DSLR to a compact digital camera where you see a huge difference in sensor size and therefore, depth of field.

Wikipedia explains all the factors that combine to affect the depth of field:

"For a given format size, at moderate subject distances, DOF is approximately determined by the subject magnification and the lens f-number. For a given f-number, increasing the magnification, either by moving closer to the subject or using a lens of greater focal length, decreases the DOF; decreasing magnification increases DOF. For a given subject magnification, increasing the f-number (decreasing the aperture diameter) increases the DOF; decreasing f-number decreases DOF.

When a picture is taken in two different format sizes from the same distance at the same f-number with lenses that give the same angle of view, the smaller format has greater DOF. When a picture is taken in two different formats from the same distance at the same f-number using lenses of the same focal length, the smaller format has less DOF."

Great article. Gave me some good insight into why my video looks like crud. (Relying on automatic settings too much.) I'll definitely be incorporating some of the tips while shooting, even though it's mostly shots of my kids doing random stuff.